Sen. Orrin Grant Hatch Esq.

Self Description

September 2006: "Orrin Grant Hatch was born on March 22, 1934, to Jesse and Helen Hatch in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His great-grandfather, Jeremiah Hatch, founded what is now known as Vernal, located in eastern Utah's great Uintah basin. Senator Hatch married the former Elaine Hansen of Newton, Utah, on August 28, 1957. They are the proud parents of six children and have 22 grandchildren.

At an early age, Senator Hatch was taught the value of hard work. His father worked long hours as a metal lather to provide for his family. As a young man, Senator Hatch also learned the metal lathing trade and was a card-carrying member of the AFL-CIO. He worked his way through college at Brigham Young University, graduating in 1959 with a degree in history. He was awarded a full honors scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh Law School. As a law student, he struggled to provide for his growing family, working as a janitor, a metal lather and at night as an all-night desk attendant in a dormitory. In 1962, he received his Juris Doctorate, graduating with honors.

After receiving his law degree, Senator Hatch was a practicing attorney, first in Pennsylvania then in Utah, until his election to the United States Senate in 1976. Since then, Senator Hatch also has received five honorary doctorate degrees from law schools and universities.

Prior to his election to the Senate in 1976, Senator Hatch had held no public office. A political outsider, he entered the race as a dark horse for the Republican nomination to oppose three-term incumbent Democrat Frank E. Moss, filing his candidacy on the last possible day. Despite the overwhelming odds against him, he fervently believed he could make a difference in Washington. His campaign was based on the guiding principles of limited government, tax restraint, and integrity in public service. After winning the G.O.P. Nomination, he went on to defeat Senator Moss, who many said could not be beaten, with 54 percent of the vote.

As Utah's senator, Orrin Hatch has continued to stand by those principles that earned him his Senate seat in 1976. He has continually fought an expanding federal bureaucracy and has been at the forefront of the battle against burdensome and costly federal regulations. He has been recognized by the National Taxpayers' Union for his fiscal responsibility and has been dubbed by others "Mr. Free Enterprise" and "Guardian of Small Business."

Senator Hatch is also a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Joint Committee on Taxation. He also has the honor of serving on the Board of Directors for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C."

Third-Party Descriptions

November 2011: "The situation is dire, but not hopeless. Even a sharply polarized politics is not insurmountable if opponents will bend a little, as Senators Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, regularly did. Despite standing on the right and left wings of their parties, they cosponsored significant legislation, including support for AIDS patients and the children’s health insurance program."

June 2011: "I was hopeful. This was in early 2002, shortly after Senators Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, and Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, introduced the Dream Act — Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. It seemed like the legislative version of what I’d told myself: If I work hard and contribute, things will work out."

June 2011: "He was the chief author of a federal law enacted 17 years ago that allows companies to make general health claims about their products, but exempts them from federal reviews of their safety or effectiveness before they go to market. During the Obama administration, Mr. Hatch has repeatedly intervened with his colleagues in Congress and federal regulators in Washington to fight proposed rules that industry officials consider objectionable."

October 2007: But Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and an architect of the bill, said Tuesday that the president’s argument was specious. “About 92 percent of the kids will be under 200 percent of the poverty level,” Mr. Hatch said at a news conference with supporters of the bill, including the singer Paul Simon.

January 2007: In October 1993, during a Senate hearing on a bill to regulate herbs, vitamins and other dietary supplements on the presumption that they were safe, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, spoke up in their defense. Herbal remedies ''have been on the market for centuries,'' he said, adding: ''In fact, most of these have been on the market for 4,000 years, and the real issue is risk. And there is not much risk in any of these products.''

September 2006: There is legislative movement afoot as well. This spring, two senators, Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, introduced a patent reform bill. Among its many provisions is one to limit damages in patent lawsuits and another to require a more substantial connection between a business and the court where it brings a patent lawsuit.

Articles and Resources

QUOTE: Institutional reforms themselves require a change in the mind-sets of our political leaders, and they will not happen without compromise. Either legislators adopt a compromising attitude, in which case the reforms are not essential, or they do not adopt it, in which case they will not be able to agree on the reforms. There is no deus ex machina that will save Congress from itself.

QUOTE: ...I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out....Last year I read about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act, a nearly decade-old immigration bill that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been educated in this country...Their courage has inspired me.

QUOTE: [Sen. Hatch] was the chief author of a federal law enacted 17 years ago that allows companies to make general health claims about their products, but exempts them from federal reviews of their safety or effectiveness before they go to market.... Mr. Hatch has been rewarded with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, political loyalty and corporate sponsorship of his favorite causes back home. His family and friends have benefited, too...

QUOTE: Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has ordered a review of a little-known Bush administration policy requiring some defendants to waive their right to DNA testing even though that right is guaranteed in a landmark federal law, officials said.

QUOTE: Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects...

QUOTE: The White House has indicated that it could accept a nonprofit health care cooperative as an alternative to a new government insurance plan, originally favored by President Obama. But the co-op idea is so ill defined that no one knows exactly what it would look like or how effectively it would compete with commercial insurers.

QUOTE: When the House votes Thursday on whether to override the veto, Republicans will insist that the answer is yes. They will express outrage that rich children could get coverage from the government while hundreds of thousands of poor children still go uninsured. Democrats say it is a total distortion for Mr. Bush and his Republican allies to say that the bill allows coverage with family incomes up to $83,000 a year.

QUOTE: the future of the $5 billion-a-year [decade-old State Children's Health Insurance Program], which serves 6.6 million children and has long enjoyed bipartisan support, has become mired in an ideological fight over the proper role of government in health care...

QUOTE: At a series of emotional meetings last month in Las Vegas, St. George, Salt Lake City and the Idaho capital of Boise, people who live downwind of the Nevada Test Site expressed fear that if the government goes ahead with its code-named Divine Strake test, radioactive dust from previous tests will blow their way.

QUOTE: "But hiding in plain sight, then as now, a national database was steadily accumulating strong evidence that some supplements carry risks of injury and death, and that children may be particularly vulnerable."

QUOTE: On the surface, there is little to recommend Marshall as a locus for global corporations looking to duke it out over who owns the rights to important technology patents. Some 150 miles east of Dallas, and just minutes from the Louisiana border, Marshall and its 25,000 residents are fairly typical of most small cities in Texas....What’s behind the rush to file patent lawsuits here? A combination of quick trials and plaintiff-friendly juries, many lawyers say....Others point to a different reason why plaintiffs may win more often than defendants: plaintiffs, they say, typically hire local Marshall lawyers.

QUOTE: ...called on Sen. Dole to remove herself from "any congressional oversight" of the Dubai port deal. "The fact that Dubai is paying her husband to help pass the deal presents both a financial and ethical conflict of interest for Senator Dole,"...

QUOTE: [a conference] ...designed to assess whether the expertise of generic-drug makers has progressed far enough to take on biologics....generic-drug makers -- as well as some insurers and government programs that pay the bills -- argue that the industry is foot-dragging as the science speeds ahead.

QUOTE: The [Senate--Ed.] bill seeks to ensure post-conviction access to DNA testing for death row and other prison inmates who claim innocence and authorizes $350 million in new funds to improve the quality of legal defense in capital cases. It also authorizes $755 million over the next five years to help clear the backlog of more than 300,000 rape kits and other crime scene evidence awaiting analysis.

QUOTE: In that case, Blakely v. Washington, the court struck down Washington state's sentencing guidelines, which, like the federal guidelines, permit judges to boost sentences based on their own post-conviction fact-finding, rather than relying only on facts admitted by the defendant or found by a jury....Though the court said in Blakely that it did not address the federal guidelines, the similarities between Washington's system and the federal system were such that defense lawyers across the country immediately began bombarding courts with Blakely challenges to their clients' sentences.

QUOTE: President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq ...

QUOTE: Even as sick residents of other Western states received compensation from the government, the question of how Idahoans may have been affected by the nuclear tests received little attention. But now a furor has erupted here and elsewhere in Idaho, set off by one Emmett native, who survived thyroid cancer but is dying of breast cancer...

QUOTE: Supporters of a new law that loosens restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons in Utah assert that allowing teachers, janitors, and other school staff to carry such weapons will add to school security.